Embodiments of this invention pertain to analytical methods and devices for proteomics. Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins, particularly their structures and functions.
Building upon the successes of the various genome sequencing projects, the new frontier of basic biological research is proteomics, the study of the repertoire of expressed proteins in a living system encoded by the genome of the cells. It is estimated that through various modes of splicing and posttranslational modifications, the human genome gives rise to hundreds of thousands of different protein forms. These huge numbers of species can also be present in widely varying amounts; for example, just the known proteins present in plasma range in concentrations over more than ten orders of magnitude [1]. Identifying and quantitating these very large numbers of proteins at widely varying concentration levels presents an enormous analytical challenge.